Key Concepts
What is it?
Team Topologies is an approach to designing team-of-teams organizations for fast flow of value.
The approach is based on years of research across many organizations from different industries, different sizes and different technological backgrounds. It addresses the most dreaded challenges in technology:
How to maintain or even accelerate speed of value creation while scaling the organization?
How to evolve an architecture along with the evolution of the organization and avoid that one becomes a blocker for the other and a blocker for the growth of the business?
The approach provides a pattern language and a thinking model, which allows you to identify the team-of-teams design most appropriate for the target architecture and fast flow of value.
Four fundamental topologies
3 team interaction modes
Four fundamental topologies
Stream-aligned team: aligned to a flow of work from (usually) a segment of the business domain
Enabling team: helps a Stream-aligned team to overcome obstacles. Also detects missing capabilities.
Complicated Subsystem team: where significant mathematics/calculation/technical expertise is needed.
Platform team: a grouping of other team types that provide a compelling internal product to accelerate delivery by Stream-aligned teams
Three team interaction modes
There are only three ways in which team should interact:
Collaboration: working together for a defined period of time to discover new things (APIs, practices, technologies, etc.)
X-as-a-Service: one team provides and one team consumes something “as a Service”
Facilitation: one team helps and mentors another team
Four fundamental topologies shown with the flow of change
Core ideas from Team Topologies: patterns for organizational success
The Nine Principles
Focus on Flow, Not Structure
Flow is how quickly work moves from idea to customer value without getting stuck in organizational bottlenecks. Structure only matters if it helps ideas become reality faster. I've seen perfectly designed org charts produce nothing but meetings and documentation. Elegant structures mean nothing if the value moves slowly to your customers.
High Trust Is Non-Negotiable
Trust shouldn't just be a corporate buzzword—it's the foundation that everything else relies on in great organizations. Low trust means trouble. Low trust environments build excessive documentation and wasteful, defensive processes that slow everyone down. I've watched organizations waste millions on process frameworks built around lack of trust in their people.
Keep Teams Together
I'll take a team that's worked together for years over a newly assembled group of rock stars any day of the week. Stable teams develop shared context and communication patterns that dramatically accelerate delivery. The hidden cost of constantly reshuffling teams is astronomical, yet most organizations do it without a second thought.
Respect Cognitive Limits
Teams can only handle so much complexity before breaking down. Each new tool, responsibility or domain your team is given taxes their mental bandwidth. Competent teams become ineffective when leaders keep adding to their plate without taking anything away.
Make Changes Small and Safe
Teams that can ship small improvements daily will always beat teams making big, risky releases quarterly. This applies to both product changes and team adjustments. The goal is to deliver value continuously in small, safe increments rather than betting everything on massive rollouts that might fail spectacularly.
Connect Teams Directly to Customers
Many teams never talk to the people using their products—they receive directives filtered through three layers of management. This game of telephone distorts customer needs and slows everything down. Teams with direct customer contact make better decisions faster because they understand the real problems. This connects back to trust—you must trust your teams to interpret customer needs correctly, rather than micromanage every interaction.
Embrace Complexity, Don't Fight It
Modern software systems are too complex for perfect prediction and planning. Organizations waste enormous energy fighting this reality instead of designing for adaptability. I've watched countless projects fail because they assumed they could plan everything ahead. Like Mike Tyson once said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.
Foster Continuous Discovery
Great ideas don't come from fancy offsites or executive brainstorms. They come from teams that have time to experiment and try new things. Sorry, not sorry. When you crush teams with endless backlogs, they stop innovating and mindlessly crunch tasks for you. I've seen teams deliver twice the value when given just one day a week to explore new approaches. This isn't optional work—it's where your next breakthrough will come from.
Eliminate Team Dependencies
Nothing kills productivity faster than one team waiting on another team. Most companies obsess over making individual teams more efficient while ignoring the massive delays that happen between teams. I've watched organizations hire more people and ship less because their teams were still waiting for each other. Fix the handoffs, not just the teams.
Words of caution
We hear sometimes criticism that the approach doesn't explain how to map the whole organization and/or create a new organizational chart.
Team Topologies is an approach to thinking and identifying where business performance gets slowed down due to bad combination of processes, teams design and/or architecture. It helps you accelerate value creation.
If your focus is to design a new org chart, you should consider other methods.
Team Topologies will help you understand how real work happens and flows. Then the approach helps you use this knowledge to design the team-of-teams organization combining both business teams and technology teams.
There is no single part of the approach, which is more important than the others. If you only use one part, e.g. team types, you are unlikely to achieve much.
Four fundamental topologies - with the flow of change
The flow of change is shown left-to-right. Stream-aligned teams own an entire slice of the business domain (or other flow) end-to-end. The Stream-aligned teams are “You Built It, You Run It” teams. There are no hand-offs to other teams for any purpose.
This diagram is a snapshot in time. The team relationships WILL change as new goals are set and the teams discover new things.
The Six Patterns
The principles tell you why. These patterns tell you how; they're the practical tools that make Team Topologies work in the real world:
Four Team Types
Don't overthink this. Every team in your organization fits into one of these four types.
Stream-aligned teams deliver direct value to customers along a value stream. They own the outcomes.
Platform teams create services that accelerate stream-aligned teams, removing complexity.
Enabling teams temporarily boost skills in other teams, then move on.
Complicated subsystem teams handle complex components requiring specialist knowledge.
Adding more types or creating hybrids just confuses everyone. I've seen companies try to create "hybrid platform-stream teams" and other nonsense that always ends in disaster. Stick to these four—they cover everything you need.
Three Interaction Modes
Most team dependencies are messy because nobody defines how teams should work together. These three modes solve that by making it crystal clear when teams should collaborate closely, provide services to each other or offer temporary assistance.
Collaboration: Working closely together (high bandwidth, high cost)
X-as-a-Service: Consuming or providing with minimal interaction (low cost, clear boundaries)
Facilitating: Helping remove obstacles (temporary and focused)
No more ambiguous "we need to coordinate better" mandates that solve nothing.
Managing Team Cognitive Load
Just as overloaded CPUs slow down computers, overloaded teams make poor decisions and move slowly. Actively monitoring and reducing unnecessary complexity is key to maintaining team effectiveness. I've seen leadership pile responsibilities onto teams until they break, then blame the team for "underperforming" when the real problem was cognitive overload.
Thinnest Viable Platform (TVP)
Most internal platforms become bloated monstrosities that slow teams down rather than accelerate progress. The TVP approach creates platforms that provide just enough capability without unnecessary complexity. A good platform should make stream-aligned teams move faster, not generate more dependencies to manage.
Flexible Team Boundaries
Team boundaries shouldn't be fixed permanently; they must adapt as products and technologies evolve. Organizations that allow teams to adjust their responsibilities based on local knowledge avoid painful reorganizations. The best companies enable teams to negotiate boundary changes directly rather than wait for top-down directives.
Continuous Adaptation
Organizational design is never "done"—it must evolve as business needs, technologies and people change. Building feedback loops that identify when adjustments are needed helps prevent organizational debt from accumulating. Small, frequent adjustments are far less disruptive than massive reorganizations forced by accumulated problems.
Guided enablement workshops
For those seeking swift adoption of cutting-edge strategies, these enablement workshops offer an unparalleled opportunity to catalyze change and drive success.
Team Topologies Guided Workshops present an expedited route for organizations eager to integrate Team Topologies methodologies swiftly.
Crafted and endorsed by the visionaries behind Team Topologies, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, these workshops distill years of consultancy into dynamic 3-hour sessions, delivering immediate, tangible results. By prioritizing interactive group dynamics, attendees are empowered to grasp concepts firsthand, accelerating organizational understanding and implementation.
Team Topologies Academy
The self-paced Team Topologies Distilled course on the Team Topologies Academy gives you all about the key ideas from Team Topologies in 3 hours.
Learn about the four types of teams, the three core interaction modes, the Platform-as-a-Product approach, or how to align teams with true value streams, have a look at the .
The Team Topologies for Managers is the best start for leaders looking for ways to to accelerate flow with a healthy ecosystem of teams aligned to streams of value and non-blocking, capability-based dependencies.
What are the core team types in Team Topologies?
What is a Thinnest Viable Platform (TVP)?
Infographics on Team Topologies
